Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Cologne
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +49 221 22126165
info@museum-ludwig.de
February 3–June 3, 2018
Photography Room
Black Power – Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch
Curator: Barbara Engelbach
On the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, the Museum Ludwig is exhibiting the works of the photographers Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch, who captured San Francisco in the turbulent 1960s with sympathy and observing distance. It was a time when, particularly on the West Coast of the United States, the various strands of the civil rights movement and counterculture came together, in which the Black Panthers emerged and hippies experimented with new ways of living and working in the Haight-Ashbury district. In 2013, the Museum Ludwig received a donation of fifty-one photographs from the Pirkle Jones Foundation in San Francisco. In February 2018 they will be presented in their entirety for the first time.
March 3–July 1, 2018
HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig
Günter Peter Straschek: Emigration – Film – Politics
Curator: Julia Friedrich
One of the most impressive documentary films in the history of German television languished in the archives of the WDR for decades: Günter Peter Straschek’s 1975 Film Emigration from Nazi Germany. Now it stands at the center of an exhibition that situates Straschek’s work in the context of the revolutionary cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. This five-hour film offers a forum to many of the more than two thousand people from the film industry forced to flee the Nazis.
The exhibition presents Straschek (1942–2009) as a man unreconciled, a filmmaker whose insistent gaze put a willfully forgotten past back on the agenda. He trained this gaze in movie theaters, among other places, notably in watching the uncompromising work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, in one of whose films he appears: Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s “Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene”.
This exhibition is part of the interdisciplinary series HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig. The artist Eran Schaerf will create an exhibition architecture that reflects the themes of “Emigration – Film – Politics.”
April 18–August 12, 2018
Haegue Yang
ETA
1994–2018
2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize
Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior, Curatorial Assistant: Leonie Radine
In 2018, the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig will award the Wolfgang Hahn Prize to Haegue Yang (*1971 in Seoul, lives in Berlin and Seoul). To mark the occasion, the museum is organizing her first major survey exhibition. More than one hundred works from 1994 to the present will illuminate her prolific and versatile oeuvre, ranging from her formative works that include objects reminiscent of Fluxus in the 1990s to lacquer paintings, photographs, works on paper, video essays, sculptures, performative works, and large-scale Venetian blind installations.
Questions of cultural and ontological identity run throughout Yang’s oeuvre. Inviting a multifaceted perception of the phenomena in our world, she continually seeks unique forms of expression and methods that allow her to trace intercultural aspects of history. The extensive yet precise selection of the works in the carefully conceived scenography of ETA will configure and render her oeuvre as harmonious, while full of dissonances.
A catalogue raisonné will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.
June 16–September 23, 2018
Photography Room
Photographer’s Name: Aenne Biermann
Curator: Miriam Halwani
Aenne Biermann (1898–1933) took photographs of her immediate surroundings from 1925 until her early death, and this body of work helped shape modernist photography. Her estate remains lost to this day, and only a few institutions hold original prints by Biermann. The Museum Ludwig will now present its full collection of over twenty of Biermann’s photographs for the first time.
August 31, 2018–January 6, 2019
Doing the Document: Photographs from Diane Arbus to Piet Zwart
The Bartenbach Donation
Curators: Barbara Engelbach, Miriam Halwani
Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, August Sander, Tata Ronkholz, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Piet Zwart, and twelve other photographers all share a documentary and artistic approach, which will be presented and simultaneously questioned in Doing the Document. Walker Evans did not describe his photographs as documentary, but instead spoke of a “documentary style.” Where does the document end and the artistic gesture begin? This is a question that must be renegotiated in these post-factual times amid the increasing aestheticization of archival and documentary materials in contemporary art.
The exhibition is the result of a donation of more than 200 works by German and American photographers from the Bartenbach family of Cologne, which recently expanded our collection considerably.
September 15, 2018–January 13, 2019
Gabriele Münter
Painting to the Point
Curators: Matthias Mühling (Lenbachhaus, Munich), Isabelle Jansen (Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation), curator in Cologne: Rita Kersting (Museum Ludwig)
Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was a central figure of German Expressionism and the artist group Der Blaue Reiter, which was founded at Münter’s house in Murnau. Her role as a dedicated proponent, mediator, and longtime companion of Wassily Kandinsky is well known and recognized. This exhibition demonstrates Gabriele Münter’s importance and independence as a painter: with more than one hundred paintings, including works from her estate that will be presented to the public for the first time, it will offer a new look at this strong artist. Münter is one of the few women who played an early role in developing modernism. The exhibition begins with rare photographs taken by Münter around 1900 during a multi-year trip through the United States. It will focus on her paintings, which, in addition to colorful portraits and landscapes, also include interiors, abstract works, and “primitivistic pictures.”
The exhibition was organized by the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation. They contributed many loans, as did collections from Germany and abroad, including the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, the Center Pompidou in Paris, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
October 13, 2018 – February 3, 2019
Photography Room
Alexander von Humboldt: Photography and Legacy
Curator: Miriam Halwani
The year 2019 will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt, who was well traveled and connected, was not only a member of the commission that voted for the worldwide publication of one of the first photographic processes in 1839. He was also subsequently given photo albums that are now valuable and singular works. Their history and their journey to the collection of the Museum Ludwig will be reconstructed, offering a look back at the early days of photography.
Contact
Anne Niermann / Sonja Hempel
Press and Public Relations
T +49 (0)221 221 23491
niermann [at] museum-ludwig.de
hempel [at] museum-ludwig.de
